Even Dennis Quaid’s uncharacteristic hamming as a mad mortician in a small Texas town can’t save this silly, scare-free horror film briefly haunting theaters en route to entombment on home video.

First seen forcing his late wife’s lover to dig up her grave and burying him in the newly vacated coffin, two years later Quaid is glimpsed dancing with her corpse at home by a group of snooping teenagers.

Gore-free mayhem follows as the overaged teens — Tony Oller and Aimee Teegarden are most prominent in the undistinguished cast — try to persuade authorities that Quaid, a pillar of the community, has killed one of their friends to ensure their silence about his nocturnal activities.

It’s sad to see Quaid in sloppily directed (by Martin Guigui) dreck like “Beneath the Darkness” less than a decade after the performance of his career as a closeted married man in “Far From Heaven.’’

Did he need the money that badly, or was he enticed by an opportunity to sing on the movie’s soundtrack? I suspect I’d get the same answer Quaid once gave me at a press conference: “That’s between me, God and my psychiatrist.”